| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 59

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Deborah Eade and Alan Leather, eds., Development NGOs and Labor Unions: Terms of Engagement (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press 2005)

MOST OF the authors of this fascinating collection of essays have worked on both sides of two divides: the one between unions and other types of NGOs, and the one between NGOs based in the global North and those based in the global South. That cooperation across this "double divide," the term used by Evans and Anner in their chapter of the book, is both possible and desirable is one premise shared by the contributors to this volume. Another shared premise is that such cooperation is difficult, and that efforts to cooperate often fail, or, at best, do not realize their full potential. Together, these shared assumptions explain the need for, and the purpose of, this book. The editors and contributors aim to draw on their experience to help others better understand the problems and opportunities involved in cooperation across the two divides, and by this means, to more effectively mitigate the problems and more fully realize the opportunities.

The volume is empirically rich. Most of its essays are case studies — detailed pieces of the vast mosaic of social movement mobilization around worker and human rights in the global economy that has emerged over the last quarter-century. Among the most important pieces of that mosaic examined in this book are struggles to advance worker and human rights in countries with very repressive political regimes (Anner & Evans, Eade, Aiyede, Povey); to curtail sweatshop production in the apparel sector and in export processing zones more broadly (Conner, Braun & Gearhart, Prieto & Quinteros, Lipschutz, Compa, Kearney & Gearhart); to empower informal sector workers (Pearson, Spooner, Johnston); to modify or stop neo-liberal trade agreements such as the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, and the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (Huyer, Anner & Evans); and to develop global networks of worker rights advocates and a global policy and regulatory infrastructure sympathetic to worker rights (Anner & Evans, Roman, Simpkins).

Some of the cases considered here, particularly the use of codes of conduct in challenges to sweatshop production in export processing zones, have already received considerable attention, though these essays shed light on such efforts from a number of useful angles. Other cases get less sustained treatment than their importance warrants. For example, three essays in this collection have important things to say about organizing in the informal sector that were new to this reader. However, only one (Pearson) is focused primarily on this subject (and mainly on one aspect of it, homework). I wish there had been more. After all, this sector probably accounts for a majority of the global South's workers; it is also growing rapidly in the global North, as Southern workers flee untenable economic conditions in their home countries. Anner and Evans identify organizing this sector as "perhaps the biggest single challenge" facing unions and NGOs alike, and note that neither of the campaigns that they discuss in their chapter — the anti-sweatshop movement and the Hemispheric Social Alliance process — seriously addresses this pressing question.

What lessons for future practice should we draw from the cases considered in this book? The editors offer no concise answer to this question. A final chapter setting out such a synthesis, instead of, or in addition to, the annotated bibliography that ends this book, would be very helpful. After so many detailed cases, there is a need to step back from the individual pieces of the mosaic to see more clearly the larger picture. A short review such as this does not permit a sustained or nuanced response to this challenge. However, I will identify some of the most important insights that I got from these essays.

With respect to the sources of tension across the two divides, at least three seem widespread. The first is the disparity in material resources between relatively rich unions and poor NGOs, and between relatively rich Northern organizations and poor Southern organizations. When richer organizations, often in the name of accountability to their members and/or funders, demand disproportionate influence over the processes that determine how their money is spent, poorer partners are bound to resent and resist.

The second widespread source of tension is overlapping turf: unions often assume that they are the primary if not exclusive actors articulating and defending the interests of workers, organized and unorganized. But other NGOs often define their mandate and constituents in ways that include workers and workplaces. Many such NGOs understandably reject unions' claims to exclusive or primary representation, particularly in areas (e.g., the informal sector) and issues (e.g., women's issues in the view of many organizations organized around gender identities) where unions have been inactive, inattentive, or ineffective.

The third source of tension is differences in goals and strategy: when is community organizing better than, or an essential supplement to, workplace-focused organizing? Should the informal sector be recognized as a reality that will not go away, for which special organizing strategies must be devised, or is that conceding too much to the deregulatory agenda responsible for the expansion of this sector? Should efforts to organize workers focus on economic needs, or is it (sometimes) better to organize workers around ethnoracial, gender, and/or national identities? Or is it better to organize women qua women, with some of what these women's organizations do focusing on the labour market? These strategic differences may be rooted in different organizational cultures that make different assumptions about what motivates people to make the sacrifices necessary for successful organizing, Or they may derive from differences in the people to whom organization leaders are accountable (e.g., workers who are members with voting rights vs. non-profit boards of directors or foundation funders).

While almost all the case studies in this book report such tensions, quite a few also tell stories of relatively successful efforts to cooperate, particularly where those efforts were sustained beyond a single campaign. None of the three basic sources of tension just outlined is likely to disappear any time soon, but each can be managed more or less successfully. If this analysis of the underlying causes of tension is accurate, then relatively successful cases of cooperation across the two divides should be found where mitigation efforts have been effective. A thorough synthetic chapter might look to see whether more successful cooperation is indeed strongly connected to such mitigation, and if it is, look at how this was achieved. Here we can look very briefly at these questions for two of the cases examined in this book.

The first case, reported by Paul Johnston, involves organizing among recent immigrant workers in California's Salinas River Valley. In 1985, reform candidates with ties to the United Farm Workers won the election for the leadership of the biggest union in the area, Teamsters Local 890. A decade later, in the wake of California's anti-immigrant Proposition 187, the union launched the Citizenship Project to help its members, most of whom were eligible, to secure citizenship. The Project was created as a separate organization from the outset, but initially it depended very heavily on union funding, and major policy decisons were made by a board comprised mainly of union members. Today, representatives of the grassroots groups sponsored by the Project constitute a majority of the board members, and only 5–10 per cent of the Project's funding comes from Local 890. Nonetheless, the union's organizing staff and the Citizenship Project are co-located, and the project's staff and volunteers are integrated into union organizing campaigns. While not quite seamless, a very powerful organizing network has been created.

This case is unusual because the NGO in question was created by the union that subsequently worked with it. These origins no doubt make cooperation easier, though hardly inevitable. The disparity of resources was turned into an advantage, with the union financing the Project's launch but then pulling back, both in funding and in control, as it developed. The two organizations work on the same turf — organizing, educating, and mobilizing immigrant workers in the region — but have developed an effective division of labour, and a willingness to devote organizational resources to the other's campaigns. While the Project is in some ways unique, many of the things that it does, and the organizing praxis that informs its efforts, are characteristic of the new low-wage and immigrant Workers' Centres that are springing up throughout the United States. Ten years ago, there were fewer than ten such centres in the USA; today, according to recent research by Janice Fine, there are at least 130. A few were founded by unions. Many more work with unions in various degrees of proximity. Johnston's chapter suggests that unions and Central Labor Councils would be well advised to follow Local 890's example of how to work with existing Workers' Centres and to help launch them where they do not yet exist. Of course, many unions do not draw a majority of their membership from the same ethnic group as the people organized by the Workers' Centres. But many unions based in the private service sector, where most employment and most growth of employment is found, do increasingly have such members. Others that lack many such members might nonetheless undertake to persuade their members that making common cause with these workers is the best way to build overall labour movement power, from which all will benefit. The prospect of many more Workers' Centres, working more closely with unions, is perhaps the most hopeful scenario we have for organizing low-wage workers, many of whom are in the informal sector.

The second case I would like to highlight briefly is the evolution of the anti-sweatshop movement, documented by Evans and Anner, Eade, Compa, Braun and Gearhart, and others. Initially, there was much tension between Northern NGOs and Southern unions because the codes of conduct that the NGOs developed were imposed with little or no consultation with Southern unions. Over time, however, communication has increased, and more importantly, some of these NGOs have recognized the desirability of placing workers' rights to organize at the heart of codes of conduct. Since the essays in this volume were written, this strategic basis for cooperation has been strengthened by the "designated supplier list" [DSL] campaign developed by the Worker Rights Consortium [WRC] and United Students Against Sweatshops.

The DSL campaign aims to get major US universities to commit to purchasing a steadily increasing share of clothing bearing their logos from companies that agree to source from subcontractors on the list. To get on this list, suppliers must have a democratic union and pay a living wage, as determined by the WRC. Since January 2006, the entire University of California system has signed onto this approach, as have several other major US universities. SweatFree Communities, a coalition of anti-sweat NGOs that push school boards and state and local governments to adopt sweat-free purchasing policies, is also moving in this direction. In this way, the power that NGOs wield through their capacity to influence institutional purchasers in the global North is being harnessed to create powerful new incentives to recognize and bargain with unions in the global South. It is a strategy with much more potential for synergies between unions and NGOs, and between workers in the global North and South, than the earlier iteration of the anti-sweatshop movement. Let's hope that the essays in this book help to stimulate new examples of such symbiotic interaction across neo-liberal globalization's two divides.


Ian Robinson University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

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